Miguel Nicolelis told Jon Stewart in 2011 that he would build a robotic suit controllable by thought in 2014, allowing someone paralyzed to walk again. He plans to show off his progress at the World Cup next year when it is held in Brazil.
Nicolelis is testing prototypes on monkeys at his lab at Duke University, Wired reports, and while he has a long way to go, he is optimistic.
"We're getting close to making wheelchairs obsolete," he said, but the Brazilian media is skeptical, and some scientists fear he could be promising too much too soon, sapping research money for a cause that may not come to fruition. The Brazilian government gave him $20 million to build his robot.
Right now, the most advanced neural prosthethis is a robotic arm attached to Jan Scheuermann, who is paralyzed from the neck down, and can move it in three dimensions and do just about everything a real arm can, although slowly and somewhat haltingly. The arm cost DARPA $100 million and connects to about 100 neurons. Nicolelis has managed to push that number to 500 in monkeys, implanting four electrode arrays to record up to 2,000 signals simultaneously. He says that with 20,000 or even 30,000 neurons, the robot would be even more responsive.
The other key to a truly successful robot is tactile feedback, which would be crucial in telling the users where their feet are and when they hit the floor. Nicolelis has already managed to give an artificial sense of touch to monkeys, allowing them to identify different virtual objects by feel, says Wired.
At the lab, students are training two monkeys to learn to control an avatar with their minds, making them touch a box and receiving a juice reward when it does. The researchers will also inject a monkey to temporarily paralyze its legs, allowing it to use what it learned from playing with the avatar to try and control it. Another function of the robot would be that it is able to take over walking if the electrode array loses the signal — as more of a safety concern.
The ideal patient to test this robot would be a young adult, no more than roughly 150 pounds, who would first learn to control an avatar before going under the knife and having electrode arrays implanted in his or her motor cortex.
